We received a ton of brilliant talk proposals for SymfonyCon Madrid so that we had a very hard time selecting the speakers for the conference but we can finally confirm the first speakers! Year after year, it's been harder to choose among the great talk proposals you all submitted. We'd like to thank very much all the people who submitted!

A new resource has popped up for those wanting to get even more information about the Laravel PHP framework - the Laracasts.com site. The site is devoted to providing a consolidated listing of Laravel screencasts across the web.

[This site is a] compilation of screencasts from Youtube and Vimeo. Let's learn Laravel together!

There's already a good number of screencasts posted to the site from folks like Taylor Otwell (author of the framework), Jeffrey Way (NetTuts) as well as several recordings of talks from various conferences about the framework. If you have a screencast that's not linked on the site, you can submit the information for review and inclusion.

To round up a wonderful year of Symfony Live conferences in Paris, London, and San Francisco, we're going to bring our tour to an end in Berlin. Symfony Live Berlin is going to take place this November on the 22nd and 23rd. As an exclusive event location we have chosen the Umweltforum Berlin - an over 100 year old church!

The first day (22nd) will be a day devoted to the "Symfony Ecosystem", things related to the framework and its community but not it directly. The second day (23rd) will be the more specific Symfony-related sessions (the list is here). There'll also be a few other events happening at the same time - a hackathon, the certification exam will be offered and an after-party will be held following the final keynote.

Anthony Wlodarski has posted a quick example of how he shared the sessions from Zend_Auth in his Zend Framework application over with a Node.js server/application.

Recently on a project I had to make changes to a underlying portion of the sites architecture to move sessions in Zend Framework from file storage to database storage. However this affected a piece of the architecture. Node.js, which manages all our real time interaction, looked at sessions at the file level. This was quite a easy transition for the function as it was abstracted away in a function call so the theory was to just replace the function "guts" with a new component.

The post shows the code he came from (which pulled in the PHP session file and extracted the session data manually) over to a new database-based version that selects from the SESSIONS table and pulls out the data. It's based on the table having an "id" column and the Zend_Auth namespace it uses.

On the php|architect site today Keith Casey has posted a ZendCon pre-cap (the conference starts today in Santa Clara, CA) talking about some of what's to come during the week for attendees - five sessions he personally is interested in.

Yet again, it's that time of year. Later today we have the kick off of the seventh ZendCon (officially called the Zend PHP Conference). This year I'm hitting the event under the php|architect banner as press. It will be my job to cover the good, the bad, the news, the chaos, and generally the things that come from the conference that might change your job on a day to day basis.

From the 70ish sessions being presented over the next few days, he highlights ones dealing with scaling applications with Redis, event-driven programming, dependency injection, character sets and API security. If you have been planning on attending and getting in on some of these great sessions, there's still time - you can still pick up a ticket at the door of the Santa Clara Convention Center.

Saturday September 17th, starting at about 9am, the conference hosted a series of talks concerning PHP and related web technologies. Topics varied from tech updates to PHP internals to CSS. [...] I enjoyed most of the talks, even though I didn't learn too much. It was a good chance to meet people and talk about our mutual interests, problems and of course solutions [...] My experience was very positive; I will definitely visit more congresses if I get the chance.

Kevin van Zonneveld has a new post to his blog revising an older post talking about session management with PHP and how limit the resources needed by them. In this post he points out another method - holding the sessions in RAM rather than on disk.

sing 2007 article Create turbocharged storage using tmpfs, we can defeat some of this over-engineering and take a simpler approach to speeding up sessions in PHP. We'll store them decentralized in memory by mounting RAM onto the existing /var/lib/php5 session directories throughout your application servers, which I will call nodes from now on.

He includes the commands you'll need to make a directory live in the RAM of your machine and how to migrate the existing sessions to this new data store. He covers some of the advantages of this approach (including that there's "less tech" involved so it's easier to manage). There is one point of failure he points out - that it wouldn't be a solution you could use for websites that might need to bridge sessions across machines.

Johannes Schluter has a new post to his blog looking at the progress that the upload progress meter extension has been making and how a version of it, put together by Arnaud Le Blanc has been introduced to the trunk line of PHP's code.

For implementing this we have one architectural problem: PHP implements, for very good reasons, a shared nothing architecture. So one request from connection has no insight into another request/connection - but this is needed for the upload progress. [...] The obvious solution, of course, would be to use PHP's session handling system for this. [...] Now there were some technical issues why this wasn't done at first ... but then Arnaud Le Blanc sat down and created a proper implementation of an upload progress storage handler which has been commit to PHP trunk. Long story short: In the next version of PHP (5.4?) you will, most likely, have an Upload Progress mechanism built-in.

If you want all of the details on it, you can check out the RFC on it. Johannes shows a sample of the settings and code that, once the next release of PHP comes out, you can use to enable the extension and be able to poll the session for the progress details.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted the latest episode of their ZendCon Sessions podcast - a talk from Shahar Evron on CouchDB.

Welcome to the ZendCon 2009 edition of the ZendCon Sessions. The ZendCon Sessions are live recordings of sessions that have been given at previous Zend Conferences. Combined with the slides, they can be the next best thing to having attended the conference itself. [...] This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2009 in San Jose, CA and features Shahar Evron giving his talk: "Introduction to CouchDB with PHP"

On the Zend Developer Zone the latest episode of the ZendCon Sessions has been posted - a recording of Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Mike Naberenzy's talk on best practices.

In this series we will be releasing regular sessions from ZendCon 2008 as we lead up to this year's ZendCon. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2008 in Santa Clara, CA and features Mike Naberezny & Matthew Weier O'Phinney giving their tutorial: "Best Practices of PHP Development".